Where have all the flowers gone?

Wednesday

Activist and folk singer Mary Travers didn’t want to do a “tell-all” book. Instead, her about-to-be released autobiography reminds readers it’s important to speak up.

It was the ire raised by a New York Post headline that led singer Mary Travers of Peter, Paul and Mary fame to write a column for the Bucks County Courier Times in the late-1980s.

Those columns and other personal essays, interviews and poems are part of a posthumously published autobiography called “Mary Travers: A Woman’s Words” which will be released in mid-January. It was compiled by former Courier Times editor Mike Renshaw of Langhorne.

As Renshaw recounted, Travers was taken to task for inviting Nicaraguan President Daniel Ortega to lunch when he was shunned by the Reagan administration.

“Jeff Greenfield wrote a condescending op-ed piece in the New York Post with the headline ‘If I Had a Hammer and Sickle,’ ” said Renshaw. “The headline flipped them out.”

Renshaw befriended Peter Yarrow while covering anti-war demonstrations after his own stint in Vietnam. When the musical trio wanted advice on how to respond to the editorial, Yarrow called Renshaw. And so began a 30-year friendship with Travers.

“I told her to write an op-ed piece answering it. Fight fire with fire,” said Renshaw with the same enthusiasm he counseled Travers with three decades ago.

Travers followed his advice, wrote the piece and gave it to him to edit. They agreed she would send it to the Post. But the next day, she called Renshaw to say she’d changed her mind and instead she wanted it published in the Courier Times.

Over the next few years, she would publish roughly 20 columns in the Levittown-based daily, some championing political views and others sharing the raw emotions of motherhood and being a proud grandparent.

It would lead to a close friendship between the two and Renshaw being regarded as Peter, Paul and Mary’s unofficial editor, according to the book’s forward by Peter Yarrow. The folk trio even recorded a song written by Renshaw called “Fair Ireland,” about political strife in the divided country in the early-1990s.

“When she got sick with leukemia in 2007, we would talk about her writing a book about her life. She would say, ‘I could never do a kiss-and-tell book,’ ” said Renshaw, who left the newspaper to pursue a television news career.

“I told her she had kissed too many people and there’s too much to tell” for a book like that.

Instead, he suggested she start with what she’d already written, use transcripts from her 1975 radio show “Mary Travers and Friends” and include some of her poetry.

The two started on the venture shortly after her diagnosis and were still working on it when she died in 2009 from complications involving radiation and chemotherapy.

“She told me,

‘You take it from here. My hands don’t work.

I can’t type anymore,’ ”

Renshaw recalled. “When she passed away, the project was nowhere near finished.”

But Renshaw stayed in close contact with her husband, Ethan Robbins, and daughter Alicia, who would always say to him: “It’s a shame we never finished Mom’s book. She always said, ‘Renshaw will finish it.’ ”

And Renshaw did, creating “a compilation of her last 25 years, her involvement with women’s issues, reproductive rights, social conscience and social justice, who she was, what was important to her from dealing with her mother coming down with Alzheimer’s to her father’s death and rescuing animals,” he said.

Renshaw said he selected writing that “truly reflected the issues of the time, as well as personal aspects” of Travers such as a piece that ran in The New York Times about an illegal abortion she had and excerpts of radio interviews with Bob Dylan, Jerry Garcia and Ritchie Havens. There also are chapters written by Ethan and Alicia chronicling their relationship with Travers.

“She was the real deal, very sweet, but very opinionated. She took no prisoners. She didn’t have any hesitation about what she thought was right or wrong,” said Renshaw, who these days runs a boutique public relations firm in Langhorne.

And her legacy?

“It’s important to have a sense of commitment and to involve yourself,” said Renshaw. “If good people stand by, bad things will happen. So speak out on an issue that’s important to you.”

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